Contact me

An Evaporated Glacier

Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, anywhere in America that is above the Glacier line east of the crest of the Sierra Nevada you will typically find evidence of a melting event that damaged the normal glacial scarring in the high Valleys, and ridges.

Those who are familiar with the way Glaciers move material when they recede will appreciate this one. One would expect that as a glacier recedes slowly the till suspended within that glacier at the higher elevations continues moving down slope as the tongue of the glacier recedes upwards. The result is a smooth, round bottomed, steep sided, valley at the top. With sharp, almost knife edged ridges surrounding it. And the last of the glacial till is deposited in a terminal moraine that marks where the last of the glaciers ice melted away.

But there is something very wrong with this picture. The first thing that caught my eye was the blunted ridges. And if you look even closer you will see that the southeast facing sides of the ridges are smooth and flowing while the northwest sides of them have jagged runnels of melt flowing down them. Also there are no terminal moraines. All of the till from the glaciers is exactly below the point where it was suspended within the glacier. There can be no other conclusion but that these glaciers didn't melt, or recede in the normal fashon. They evaporated. Almost instantly.

Without detailed analysis of the stone in the melt runnels on the ridges it is not possible to put a precise date on this event. But there were glaciers here that day and they have not returned. Which places it around the end of the last ice age.

Here is a ridge in the Rockies that is over twelve thousand feet. The fluid state of the stone as it was forced up and over the ridge is clearly obvious. As is the fact that no glaciers have returned since the melting event. It isn't clear fom this angle, but that melted stone was driven up a very steep sided glacial ridge of more than two thousand feet before splashing over the edge.

Granite crumbles to a pile of sand when it decomposes. Repeated freezing of the moisture on the surface expands cracks in a process called ex-foliation. We see no such decomposition here. This stone shows less weathering, and ex-foliation, then the stones in the ruins of ancient Greece, or the pyramids at Giza.

The standard theory here that these melt formations are 28 million years old. That's more than ten thousand times older than the stone in the ruins of ancient Greece. And yet as you can see, there is no trace of glacial scarring, ex-foliation, crumbling, or any other decomposition whatsoever. Structurally speaking, the runnels we see at the bottom edge of this splash curtain are no different from the runnels of melt you might see hanging from the side of a candle in that they are only really attached at the top. And as you can see there is no support from below. Nor is the any debris from pieces fracturing loose, and falling into a pile below. These type of melt formations do not have the structural integrity to survive the granding action of even one ice age.

Nothing on this world is permantant, or indestructable. And nothing on this planet survives unchanged for so long; not even the rocks.